Obama launches searing attack on Trump, appeals voters to elect Biden

Washington: Former US president Barack Obama delivered a diatribe against his successor Donald Trump on Wednesday, accusing him of mismanaging the pandemic, as he appealed to the people to come out and vote in favour of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Jumping into the electoral campaign in support of his former vice president Biden and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris, Obama appealed to the people to defeat Trump and elect the Biden-Harris team on November 3.
“They have a plan for the economy and the coronavirus pandemic,” Obama said in his maiden campaign appearance, asserting that the “Biden-Harris team will bring character and leadership back to government”.
Obama spoke as the sun set, the sky going from pink to gray, framed by the clouds and the Lincoln Financial Field behind him. He stood by himself on stage, far from even the cars in the lot. His podium was sanitized before he spoke, and though he was without a mask for the speech, he put a ‘VOTE mask’ on soon after he finished, before walking off. “We cannot afford four more years of this, Philadelphia,” Obama said in his blistering attack against Trump, which is quite unusual for a former president against an incumbent one.
“The idea that this White House has done anything but screw this up is just untrue,” Obama said at a drive-in rally.
“Tweeting at the television doesn’t fix things. Making stuff up doesn’t make things better. You’ve got to have a plan. We literally left this White House a pandemic playbook… They probably used it to prop up a wobbly table somewhere,” he said.
Referring to a recent news report that Trump maintains a bank account in China, the former US president said, “He’s got a secret Chinese bank account. How is that possible? Can you imagine if I had had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for re-election. You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that. They would have called me Beijing Barry.”
“Donald Trump isn’t going to protect us. He can barely take the basic steps to protect himself. If he’d actually been working the whole time, it never would have gotten this bad,” Obama said. (PTI)